When the world feels heavy: Supporting your team through overwhelm in the age of perma-crisis
This year’s World Mental Health Day highlights how constant exposure to harrowing global events and relentless bad-news cycles can fuel feelings of overwhelm, emphasising the urgency of supporting our mental health in times of crisis.
As a manager, you might have noticed something subtle but significant happening within your team: motivation dipping, focus wavering, conversations feeling a little heavier than usual, a new sort of weltschmerz descending. Hardly surprising, really, given that we seem to be living through an age of what feels like unprecedented misery and uncertainty.
Switch on the TV, open any news app or scroll through social media, and you're immediately confronted by bad news: conflict, climate disasters, social unrest, economic instability. It’s no wonder that many of us are already despairing at the state of the world before we’ve even had our first cup of coffee.
The emotional toll of a 24/7 crisis cycle
Psychologists around the world have noticed a significant uptick in recent years of patients presenting with news-related stress and climate anxiety.
While the psychological stress of dealing with bad news is nothing new, what is different today is the sheer volume and accessibility of that news and the fact that we’re being actively guided towards it, with news outlets and social media platforms tending to highlight more negative or dramatic news in an attempt to drive clicks and boost their share of viewers.
Research shows a direct link between negative news consumption and anxiety, as it can activate the body's fight or flight response and trigger a release of stress hormones, with one recent study showing an increase in anxiety symptoms after just 14 minutes’ exposure. To make matters worse, we can often feel powerless to do anything to change the situation, leading to persistent feelings of anger and frustration.
This can show up at work in the form of:
Fatigue, despite getting adequate rest
Trouble focusing or making decisions
Difficulty regulating emotions
Social withdrawal
Feelings of helplessness or guilt
Difficulty engaging in collaborative work.
Providing support as a manager
As a manager, it’s important to recognise these as signs that your team may need support, space and understanding. But with new data from MHFA England ® showing that a third of managers (33%) feel out of their depth supporting their team with mental health concerns, it’s clear that many managers are struggling to respond to these new mental health challenges.
While you can’t change the news cycle, you can help your team navigate it with more resilience and self-care. Manager mental health training helps leaders recognise the impact of relentless bad news and uncertainty on their teams, equipping them with the skills to respond with empathy, set healthy boundaries, and create a supportive environment where mental health is prioritised.
If you’re struggling to support your team, here are some ways to offer meaningful support:
1. Provide wellbeing and resilience training
Understanding how to support our own mental health and wellbeing is essential in times of stress and uncertainty, and the right training can empower us to stay strong, focused and productive.
Wellbeing workshops equip your employees with skills and actionable techniques to boost their wellbeing and create healthy lifestyles, while resilience training provides practical tools for developing the mental strength, emotional regulation and coping strategies needed to adapt to stress, overcome adversity, and bounce back from challenges.
Contact us to find out about our solutions.
2. Acknowledge the emotional climate
Don't ignore what's going on in the world or pretend that it’s got nothing to do with the job in hand. Instead, create space, either formally or informally, for people to express how they’re feeling or voice what’s preying on their mind. This might look like:
Starting meetings with a genuine check-in
Validating people’s emotional responses without criticising or trying to ‘fix’ them
Normalising conversations about mental health and wellbeing.
External stressors can easily spill over into professional environments, affecting concentration, communication and general morale. Supporting employees' mental wellbeing helps to prevent reactive behaviours and reduce the likelihood of workplace conflict, and promotes a culture of respect.
3. Model and encourage boundaries
Encourage your team to set boundaries around news consumption and emotional labour and model this behaviour yourself, for example by:
Not checking headlines first thing in the morning
Taking breaks from social media during work hours
Encouraging your team to log off completely during lunch or take daily digital ‘detoxes’.
Setting boundaries isn’t an act of selfishness or avoidance – it’s a way of maintaining our emotional wellbeing.
4. Focus on what’s within reach
When the problems of the world feel too big, remind your team of the importance of local impact and showing up where it matters, be that at home or at work. Help them reconnect with:
The value of their day-to-day work
Opportunities to contribute to causes close to their hearts
Simple acts of kindness within the team or community.
Even small actions, like checking in on a colleague, lending a hand or giving constructive feedback can restore a sense of agency and purpose.
5. Support joy without guilt
It’s very important to remind your team that it’s okay to laugh, connect, and find joy - even during difficult times and when others are suffering. Think about:
Celebrating small wins by recognising progress and effort, not just big achievements
Making space for laughter and activities that bring people together
Leading by example by sharing good news and other moments of joy.
Allowing ourselves to have fun and find solace in humour isn’t disrespectful to the suffering in the world. It’s actually a key part of building our resilience.
At Ripple&Co, we help organisations build environments where people feel safe, supported, and able to thrive, even during the most challenging times. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how our training solutions can help you support greater resilience and better wellbeing for your people.